Query missing results that appear in site search

MusicBrainz Development
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1

Howdy!

I’m still working on my app for creating NFO files for Kodi music videos. I thought I had everything done when I started to run into problems with the query API returning differnt results than a standard MusicBrainz search. I’m using the same criteria as a previous topic where I’m searching for Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)”. This is the query I’m using:

https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/recording?query="i wanna dance with somebody (who loves me)" AND artist:"whitney houston"&fmt=json

This nets me 59 results. The problem is the recording I need, from the album “Whitney”, doesn’t appear.

The MusicBrainz search engine finds it fine with:

https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=i+wanna+dance+with+somebody+(who+loves+me)+AND+artist:"whitney+houston"&type=recording&limit=25&method=advanced

which returns 175 results and the album is on page 2.

So I adapted my query to use the same encoding:

https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/recording?query=i+wanna+dance+with+somebody+(who+loves+me)+AND+artist:"whitney+houston"&fmt=json

which also returns 175 results, but not the same ones and is still missing the album “Whitney” and the recording 900c26eb-e3a4-481d-9c3b-dd8963a7c185

Since the documentation implies using query is the same as the regular MusicBrainz website search I’m at a loss.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as TheAudioDB.com MusicBrainz IDs are often wrong and I’d prefer to get results directly from MusicBrainz.

Thanks!
Chris

2

API search results like the website search are paginated. Use the offset parameter to get the remaining pages

3

But for the moment the pagination is broken (confirmed for works, recordings and release groups):

There is a fix pending:

In the meantime you can set a limit=100 and hope you don’t have more than 100 results.

2 Likes
4

Hi Chris!

You have to escape the parentheses in your query as these are special characters in Lucene search syntax which is linked from Indexed Search Syntax - MusicBrainz.

Both

https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/recording?query="i wanna dance with somebody \(who loves me\)" AND artist:"whitney houston"&limit=100&fmt=json

and

https://musicbrainz.org/search?query="i wanna dance with somebody \(who loves me\)" AND artist:"whitney houston"&type=recording&limit=100&method=advanced

return 59 results with the recording 900c26eb-e3a4-481d-9c3b-dd8963a7c185.

Cheers,
Yvan

3 Likes
5

Hey Yvan!

You’re awesome :grinning:. I gotta say it’s weird that using \( and \) works but %28 and %29 do not in the API when that encoding does work in the site search. Also I don’t understand why not including &limit=100 produces different results (as in your version without &limit=100 also returns 59 results but without the album “Whitney” ones).

I’m not gonna complain but I have to ask are there any other characters I should escape when using query= or is there a page that documents this necessity?

Thanks so much,
Chris

6

This issue is related to sorting. See the above explanation by @jesus2099. There is some work in progress to address it, but no expected time of arrival can be given.

Those characters are + - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ / as listed in the linked Lucene documentation page. Admittedly, advanced search is austere for now.

1 Like